In a world where boundaries, especially on the Web, are becoming less and less defined, where products can be purchased from the other side of the globe at a moment’s notice, and with a system structured to speed up shipping times as much as possible, building a multilingual platform for an e-commerce has become essential. In particular, a website written in multiple languages is a detail that should not be underestimated precisely if you intend to get ahead of the competition and broaden your target audience. Moreover, it is a winning structure and one that can be used even once an e-commerce has already been put online.
Because the multilingual platform is really critical:
– Anticipate competition: a product or service that has strong competition in one country may find greater scope in another nation instead. Not to mention that certain marketing actions that have long been used in one country may instead be very innovative and particularly suitable for the new geographic area.
– Broaden the target audience: one’s products and services may also be of interest to other countries. Indeed, in some cases, they may even be more profitable and attract more attention.
– Marketing costs: opening sales in a new country may cost less than finding new ‘micro niches’ in the already penetrated market.
– New search engines: there are countries where the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) are not the default search engines, in China, for example, there is Baidu, in France Voila. Having a multilingual site allows the platform to be indexed on other search engines as well.
It goes without saying that once you have planned the work needed to create a winning e-commerce site, you should not neglect translation at all. The latter will have to be flawless since it is now well known that a loosely translated site has a significantly lower trust than one that is precisely and accurately produced–in short, native-proof.
A tip to make the platform truly flawless and profitable? Never forget to group users. How? On the “.com” site, for example, we use the English language so we can bring in both users from the United Kingdom and users from the United States (of course then we would also have users from other nations who search in English and, as a result, can still land on our site). In this case, segmenting the audience in order to create geographic clusters can be complicated if a geographic attribute per individual user has not been provided beforehand.
